Dry
by JacklynK
Summary: Check it out. You won't regret it.


Set after Kyra's death, this story was inspired by Paul Simon lyrics that simply would not leave me alone before I explained them to myself. The poetry is his and Riddick isn't mine either, but I'm pretty proud of this one. One-shot, so don't bug me. But tell me what you think, please, good or bad, it's all welcome.

- -

Anger and no one can heal it

Slides through the metal detector,

Lives like a mole in a motel,

A slide in a slide projector

And the cool, cool, river

Sweeps the wild, wide ocean

The rage, the rage of love turns inward

To prayers of devotion.

And these prayers are

The constant road across the wilderness

These prayers are

These prayers are the memory of God

The memory of God

- -

I believe in the future

We shall suffer no more

Maybe not in my lifetime,

But in yours I feel sure.

Song dogs barking at the break of dawn

Lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm

And these streets

Quiet as a sleeping army,

Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven

For a mother's restless son

Who is a witness to, who is a warrior,

Who denies his urge to break and run

- -

Hard times?

I'm used to them.

The speeding planet burns,

I'm used to that.

My life's so common it disappears.

And sometimes even music

Cannot substitute for tears.

- -

A dark figure crouched on the partially-destroyed roof, and listened with absolute stillness for movement below. They had to be there, there was no place else to go anymore. Asleep?

There. He heard the quiet sound of a door opening. _Checking on Zeza again, _Riddick reasoned. What a strange, useless gesture. As if checking the girl's room could stop the destruction of the planet. _But emotions are like that, _he thought. God, how he wished it wasn't…

Now that he knew they were safe, Riddick decided he didn't really need to go inside. Only the woman was awake, and she wasn't the one that mattered anyway. He could only imagine trying to convince her to let _him_ anywhere near the child. He could have acknowledged the incredible hypocrisy of that thought, but made the almost conscious decision not to.

Riddick rose, but could think of nowhere else to go. He could not bring himself closer to these people, he was as good as made of acid. And the thought of returning to the ship, as if it were some kind of home, was unbearable. But lack of a destination had never stopped him before. He decided on Southwest.

- -

Riddick made no effort to travel tactically; he simply trudged on through the middle of the street. He vaguely wondered if it was a credit to the people of this planet that anarchy hadn't made anyone stupid enough to try to rob him, but although the news of his damned lordship had not traveled fast enough for anyone to know his face, there was something in his dead eyes and still-shouldered walk that no one wanted to come near. He looked like a man desperate to die and angry enough to kill. If he was an eloquent man he would have said that he felt like a ghost on fire, too dead to feel but so horribly, viciously alive.

Endless time passed and the night only got darker. The buildings around him were thinning and becoming smaller, and Riddick's exhaustion had reached that constant level that stretches on forever on the edge of falling unconscious. Cobbled road faded to hardpack, and soon all human life ended and there was nothing but sand. Riddick barely noticed. He walked straight on into the desert.

The growing grey light revealed a river only meters before him. Exhaustion, grief, whatever you want to blame--finally took him and Riddick stumbled to his knees before it. The light of dawn had been delayed by a growing drystorm on the horizon, and somewhere upwind there was a farm where a pack of Helion dogs could smell the lightning. And to Riddick's desert-dry eyes, it was all Kyra. The half-light of the mortally crippled planet, the strange, melodious howling of the dogs, the river running through the barren desert. And this was both the most beautiful moment of Richard Riddick's life, and the worst he had ever, ever felt.

Riddick felt more than heard the deep thrumming of a ship approaching behind him. Tailing him, the insolent bastards. The ship landed and he heard the ridiculously loud sound of approaching armor. These men who stole his Kyra and impaled her, this army so brainwashed and incompetent that they had failed to kill him even when he had lost the will to fight. He closed his eyes and could see them perfectly, could count the seconds it would take to take a shiv to each one in turn, could imagine the bodies bleeding out into the sand.

The footsteps stopped a full meter out of range, and the run of Riddick's rage-filled fantasy stopped with them. And with that pause the final image of this scene expanded to include himself, standing among the bodies of another killing ground. Standing there just as alive and alone, with blood on his hands and splattered on his body, and the thought made Riddick sick.

"M'lord?" Riddick didn't recognize the voice, but he didn't care. He ignored the soldiers entirely, purposefully erasing them from the world he saw and felt and mourned for. With a sense of ritual he was too exhausted to try to shake, Riddick bent and immersed his hands in the warm, running water, as if to wash off the blood his imagination had smeared on them. He watched the river flow over and around him, carrying real and imagined sins away to dissipate into the ocean somewhere. And something deep inside of him collapsed under unbearable weight.

Riddick surrendered. To his continued existence, to lordship, to tears. Riddick squeezed his eyes shut against the submission and although he had no idea who he addressed, he spoke two words into the river and the endless desert:

"Guide me…


End file.
